(from the archives)
Prodded on by my father, I read David Wick's Infamous Boundary, an account of the history of Quantum Mechanics and of the EPR controversy.
In the book, there is a nice passage about mentorship ... for those of you not in science, a large chunk of a scientist's career takes place under the gaze of a supervisor (or mentor), whose role is to guide and teach their underlings. Some cynics may add that mentors also claim credit for their underlings' findings ... but let's not go there ...
From the Infamous Boundary:
In collaborations among scientists at various stages of their careers, it is generally the older scientists who choose the direction of research and legitimize or repudiate the ideas of their younger colleagues. Sometimes, of course, their conservatism stifles the younger scientists' creativity - but neither Bohr nor Born was conservative. The role of the youngsters, on the other hand, with their boundless enthusiasm, unformed epistemologies, and original techniques, is to break through the logjam in a blocked research program. It is for this reason that thoughtful older scientists like to work with younger men or women in their twenties or early thirties. Of course, it helps if they are geniuses, or at least very bright.
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I'm not yet a grad student, but i just want to know if this book talk about somethings to do if you though your mentor was open-mind but finally he's to much conservatist ?
This book is about this history of the Einstein-Podolsky-Rosen paradox.
Every year all the big names in particle physics would meet. And Einstein who did not believe in Quantum Mechanics would throw a problem to Borh et al. in an attempt to stump the QM proponents. These paradoxes involved an apparent contradiction between the Uncertainty Priciple and General Relativity. Every year, Bohr would solve the problem to Einstein's satisfaction except one year (the year that Einstein proposed the EPR paradox).
So the book is about the history of EPR ... and this quote was just something that I found amusing, particularly the last line.
Excuse me if my QM history is a bit rusty but by the time the EPR paper was published, Einstein had come to the conclusion that Quantum Mechanics was valid both experimentally and theoretically. What he objected to was the implicit assumption that Quantum Mechanics was a complete description of the physical phenomena. Einstein continued to assert that particles had definite momentum and position, but that the formalism limited the existance of physical characteristics only upon measurement.
Sorry for being a nitpicker
MTW
MTW,
Yeah I guess I should change that phrase to "had problems with certain aspects of QM" in particular the uncertainty principle. I don't think that Einstein ever agreed with every aspect of QM (i.e. 100%), but it's not my field, so what do I know. In anycase, feel free to nitpick (or more likely correct me) anytime.